Why!" he continued, noticing that his wife wept, "I have even
decomposed tears. Tears contain a little phosphate of lime, chloride
of sodium, mucin, and water."
He went on speaking, without observing the spasm of pain that
contracted Josephine's features; he was again astride of Science,
which bore him with outspread wings far away from material existence.
"This analysis, my dear," he went on, "is one of the most convincing
proofs of the theory of the Absolute. All life involves combustion.
According to the greater or the lesser activity of the fire on its
hearth is life more or less enduring. In like manner, the destruction
of mineral bodies is indefinitely retarded, because in their case
combustion is nominal, latent, or imperceptible. In like manner,
again, vegetables, which are constantly revived by combinations
producing dampness, live indefinitely; in fact, we still possess
certain vegetables which existed before the period of the last
cataclysm. But each time that nature has perfected an organism and
then, for some unknown reason, has introduced into it sensation,
instinct, or intelligence (three marked stages of the organic system),
these three agencies necessitate a combustion whose activity is in
direct proportion to the result obtained. Man, who represents the
highest point of intelligence, and who offers us the only organism by
which we arrive at a power that is semi-creative--namely, THOUGHT--is,
among all zoological creations, the one in which combustion is found
in its most intense degree; whose powerful effects may in fact be seen
to some extent in the phosphates, sulphates, and carbonates which a
man's body reveals to our analysis.
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